Other forms: scrubs, scrubbing, scrubbed
To scrub is to clean by rubbing hard with something rough — a brush, a wire pad, a stiff cloth. You scrub a burnt pan, scrub the mud off boots at the back door, scrub a floor on your knees with the bucket beside you.
Effort is the whole point: wiping is gentle, scrubbing is work, and you scrub AT a mark that refuses to come off. Informally it means cancel, as though rubbing a plan off a board — they scrubbed the launch, scrub that, I have the wrong date. Surgeons scrub up before an operation, which is where scrubs, the loose blue clothes, take their name. A scrub is also a gritty paste for the skin, a face scrub. And in a separate sense the word is a landscape: dry scrub stretching to the horizon, low and tough and half-grown.
1verbscrubTo clean something by rubbing it hard with a brush or a rough cloth.
“She scrubbed the pan until the black came off.”
Patternscrub + noun (the floor, a pan, potatoes) · scrub sth clean · give sth a scrub · a scrubbing brush
synonyms: scour
2verbcancelTo cancel something that had been planned.
“They scrubbed the flight when the fog came in.”
3nounactAn act of hard cleaning, or a gritty paste used to clean the skin.
“The floor needs a good scrub.”
4nounlowLow rough bushes and small trees growing on dry poor ground.
“The track ran for miles through dusty scrub.”
scrub is a way of cleaning.
scRUB → RUB, and RUB hard
Rub, and rub hard: the brush goes back and forth over the pan until the black comes off.
hooks ontorub
The origin on record for scrub is the landscape one. Late Middle English shrobbe, 'stunted tree', comes from Old English scrybb, which makes scrub and shrub the same word wearing two spellings — and explains why a stretch of low, tough bushes is called scrub. The cleaning verb lives alongside it in modern English, sharing the shape but not this line of descent.
Old English
scrybb
Middle English
shrobbe
English, today
scrub
Late Middle English shrobbe in the sense of "stunted tree," a variant of shrub, from Old English scrybb. a doublet of shrub.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA